Flux

I feel a shimmer of guilt whenever I succumb to drawing flowers. 

The Postgraduate Supervisor in my mind sneers, the Cool Kids shun me, the Galleries cough politely.

But lately I have been letting myself do it, anyway. And it turns out that, as with most self-indulgent pleasures deemed dirty by the powers that be, it is educational, deeply satisfying, and perfectly normal and healthy.

Here is today's offering:

On a more earnest note, I am pursuing a compelling idea at the moment that is giving me great energy in the studio. I'm not sure if I can even rough it out in words, but it has something to do with releasing form from the confines of a single moment or point of view (think Cubism, but madly beautiful, less brown and less boxy) and, most importantly, enabling the perception or implication of motion.

Oddly enough, each first attempt, so far, has resulted in the opposite qualities to those intended, as with the image above: meticulously observed, static and illusion-driven. There is a part of me that simply delights in drawing this way. I spent much of today in rapturous concentration at my desk, at one point discovering painfully that I had not uncrossed my legs for hours. 

I have always derived enormous satisfaction from conjuring three dimensions out of two, but right now I am chasing this other aspect - a shifting energy; movement; flux. I want the contours to break down, the light to spill out, the lines to quiver.

This fascination with motion may be reflective of my current state of being. In less than a fortnight, I will leave my happy, mostly peaceful home of three years, part ways with my wonderful sister, and start the adventure of living with my Beloved, his brilliant young son and their bouncy dog, in a house whose condition we fondly describe as a cosy squalor.

Even now, as I sit quietly in my tidy living room, the clock ticking gently, warm light spilling from the kitchen, I know that all the silhouetted forms of my furniture, so stable and sure, are really already in motion. This house has a new tenant arriving soon, the cleaners will be in, the keys returned. Everything is in flux.

All this stillness is only an illusion.

But, in the calm before the storm, I have some time on my hands. 

I have time, at least, to spend a day making a perfectly still image, an anchor, knowing that tomorrow I can return to the same vase of flowers and a new page, and discover what other possibilities are inherent in them, and inherent in me.